After Effects CS5 Larger-Format Rendering Issues

[Eric Santiago]

Its February 2011, is this still an issue?
We got around this by using MainConcept MPEG Encoder.
It only works for us since 99% of our output is for Digital Signage MPG2. However at times (which is today) I need to export an Uncompressed Quicktime from After Effects CS5.
Seriously is this fixed yet?

[Stephen Rutherford]

This is a reply I recieved after submitting a bug report with Adobe:

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Thanks for filing this bug.

We have reproduced the problem.

In my testing, the bug behavior is limited to two conditions:
– The horizontal dimension of the composition is greater than 4095 pixels.
– The vertical dimension of the composition is less than the minimum required height for the format. For AVI the value is 32 pixels; for QuickTime and most other formats the value is 16 pixels.

My best recommendation for a workaround is to render to QuickTime and then transcode to AVI using After Effects CS4 or earlier.

About the format constraints, which are new to After Effects CS5: they were added to solve the problem that previous versions of After Effects could pass parameters to the exporter modules that weren’t legal for the format. That could cause bad renders or render failures. Most of the constraints imposed by this new mechanism come from the format specifications and are not arbitrary. A more thorough description is available here:
https://blogs.adobe.com/toddkopriva/2010/06/output-module-constraints-in-a.html

The problem with the constraints that you’re working around, that the minimum size constraints for AVI aren’t small enough for your workflow, is actually a different problem from the constraint logic itself. Those values are simply fixed, and while I’m sure that the programmer who chose those values had a reason, I understand why they seem arbitrary.

This will be fixed in a future release of After Effects. AVI and QuickTime will have lower minimum size constraints.

The After Effects team has heard this complaint from you and several other customers creating content for stadium screens. Before we released CS5 I don’t think we understood how After Effects was used in the stadium screen workflow. The feedback we’ve gotten from customers like yourself has been very helpful.

There’s a convoluted explanation for why these particular limits exist for AVI and QuickTIme in After Effects CS5. The short version of the story is that CS5 needed 64-bit versions of the exporters, which were provided by Adobe Media Encoder, but their primary client is Premiere Pro, where two-digit frame sizes are uncommon. The After Effects team discovered the high minimum size constraints, but because we didn’t understand your particular workflow we made a bad assumption that the values were not a problem.

Ultimately, my apologies for the inconvenience caused by these two problems. We really do appreciate that you took the time to file the bug and express how the changes in After Effects CS5 impact your workflow.

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Basically, it will not be fixed in CS5, but in CS6… hopefully we’ll get a discount on it since it didn’t work for us 😉

Stephen Rutherford
Graphics Producer: Gale Force Media, CanesVision & Wolfpack TV
stephenr@carolinahurricanes.com
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